Maybe everyone should join Arthur in his quest to answer that question? Too many are not opening a space for it.

What a fun way to provide an answer to Arthur's question, though, Mary Lee, by using that military metaphor with such lusciousness. (By the way, I loved the "pun" on hardened. Not ready for "battle"...yet...'though heavy losses are expected.)

And 33 hours! I echo, Carol W.'s response! Judging by the photo above, you sure can multi-task!

Mary Lee, since I am both a chocaholic and a baker I found this haiku a delicious treat. The treats are your own personal battalion soon to be hardened by your gentle touch. War with chocolate may make the military a sweetened brigade.

I wrote two today. Started with free verse, then really wanted to make it haiku. It bothers me the days I don't stick to the form. By the way, I think haiku is way harder than free verse because it's hard to be so precise in word choice. Not necessarily a bad thing, just hard for me.

I love both of these, though for different reasons. For instance, the free verse allowed me to get those last few lines, which I so love: that his world/will soon be/a little warmer/a little kinder/and a little less bumpy. I loved the way they tied back to the snow and cold. But the line "please be kind" rings so long in my mind in the haiku. Differently lovely.

Here's my tanka for today. (I really have become captivated by the form...)

The scene: At dusk dog walk, the fog was thick and the darkness and silence were almost complete. From the hill above the valley, a lone car crept. I waited and watched and I got a feeling like when I listen to one of those Zen bells, that moment where I shift from hearing a sound ring in the silence to hearing the silence wrap up the sound.

headlights lead a carthrough the valley --darkness swallowsthe crunchof gravel

Interesting! As I watched, I was struck by how the experience of watching this journey from atop the hill was so different than the experience of the driver of the car. For the driver, as I know from driving those roads, the world was full of possible dangers, and it unfolds in the brightness that is always ahead. For me on the hill watching, the journey was momentary; after a brief moment, it gets absorbed by once again by the silence. Which got me thinking about whether I'd be able to capture in a poem that feeling of what a journey looks like from the outside, especially in a poem that is so short I can't really explicitly establish a point of view. Not sure it worked, but maybe that's okay, too! Your thoughts help me think about how I might show vantage point in short poems, or even if that's the point!

P.S. I have been messing around with tanka, since reading yours and reading the website you cited a few days ago. I don't have the hang of the hinge line. I understand what it's supposed to do, I just can't do it yet.

I can't get that hinge thingy! But maybe using punctuation for the pivot is okay? I just think it's cool to place two images together, or find one image from inside the other. That's what I'm grooving on now.

About Me

I am a fifth grade teacher. I am the author of Reconsidering Read-Aloud (Stenhouse) and I have poems in the Poetry Friday Anthology, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Science, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations (Pomelo Books), Dear Tomato: An International Crop of Food and Agriculture Poems, National Geographic Books of Nature Poems, The Best of Today's Little Ditty (2014-15 and 2016), Amy Ludwig VanDerwater's Poems are Teachers, National Geographic's The Poetry of US, and IMPERFECT: Poems About Mistakes.